


Mr. Postman

by Lokei



Category: Fantastic Four (Movieverse)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-14
Updated: 2007-05-14
Packaged: 2017-10-19 02:24:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Letters of business…how odious I should find them!”  “It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of yours.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mr. Postman

**Author's Note:**

> beta'd by the delightful [](http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/profile)[**romanticalgirl**](http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/), despite the fact that it was Mother's Day weekend.

Shortly after the whole Von Doom episode, Reed took over the job of sorting and processing the team’s sudden explosion of fan mail. There was no way Johnny could do it, even though the largest proportion by far of individual mail belonged to him—there was simply no chance that he would remember to run it through the scanners to make sure there wasn’t anything inside from someone wishing to take out the Fantastic Four, and an even higher statistical improbability that Johnny could resist the temptation to read everyone else’s mail. Ben lacked the manual dexterity to deal with envelopes, of course, and Sue seemed to find the whole thing too wearisome to contemplate after the third time some girl sent Johnny her underwear.

So it was Reed’s job rather by default, though in truth, he didn’t mind. He had a special double-depth inbox for letters addressed to “Johnny Torch” by the leagues of enthusiastic, if occasionally embarrassingly illiterate teenagers, and an extra-wide one to accommodate those of Ben’s letters from admirers who were thoughtful enough to send things in boxes or giant manila envelopes.

The majority of Ben’s mail seemed to be from schools and societies that asked him to come speak to kids about the power of being different—the word they usually chose was ‘unique’—and after Reed suggested mildly that Ben accept the first fifteen or twenty with no apparent result, he finally agreed to go to a few and found he rather enjoyed it, which surprised no one but himself.

Sue’s letters—from what Reed could tell discreetly, as he was strictly forbidden to open them—were of much the same stripe, with an emphasis on letters and drawings from little girls writing to their heroine. There was also the odd letter or two every week from a prison convict professing his undying love for her and occasionally requesting her assistance in “busting out.” Reed thought he deserved a medal for keeping a straight face when Sue had reached that part of one such missive, especially since for once, he had understood why Johnny fled to the bathroom in a fit of hysterics and Ben had broken the sofa trying to hold back his own gargantuan laughing fit—and Sue had not gotten the joke at all.

Reed’s favorites though, were the ones addressed to all of them, especially big bundles of letters that came from classrooms, with painstakingly copied messages on penmanship paper, or creatively spelled originals, and piles of marker and crayon drawings. One drawing featured a person he thought was himself, a tall blue skyscraper of a man dangling a tiny Von Doom upside down by one foot as the metal figure (painstakingly rendered in silver crayon) shot impotent lightning bolts at even tinier people around Reed’s feet. Reed kept that one on the bulletin board in his lab in a prominent location.

His second favorite was the one Johnny had insisted on putting up on the refrigerator door, which showed Reed’s arms stretched around Ben’s orange bulk and a red and yellow streaky thing which Johnny proclaimed was clearly himself (“A Picasso in the making,” Ben had snorted). Sue objected to this picture when Johnny first put it up—“But I’m not even in that one!”—and Johnny had shaken his head at her with exaggerated patience. “Well of course not, sis, you can’t draw the Invisible Girl.” She took it down repeatedly, but as it mysteriously kept reappearing, she’d given up and pretended she didn’t notice anymore.

He saved them all, though, and within a few weeks had adapted his handwriting recognition software to turn out a credible facsimile of his fastidious, spare printing. All he had to do then was add in the classroom names to one of a few appropriate form letters—thank you so much, such wonderful artists, sure you’ve all got the makings of something special, both scientists and students need to keep their eyes and ears open—print it out and have the others all sign the bottom of what looked like an individualized, handwritten response. Reed even had a database set up to log the various schools and their locations, so that he could be sure not to send them the same letter if they wrote more than once, and out of curiosity one day had programmed the spreadsheet to link to a map so he could see the distribution of school fan letters by geographic area.

“Dude,” Johnny had said when Reed had made the mistake of actually answering when Johnny had asked what he was doing, “you take these six year olds, like, way too seriously. It’s the sixteen through twenty-six year olds that are really worth all the effort.”

Taking the eye roll Reed gave him as merely his due, Johnny had chuckled, slapped him on the shoulder, and gone to go jump off the balcony or whatever it was he did for fun, making Reed very happy that he hadn’t shown Johnny the second map.

The second map was the real reason Reed didn’t mind dealing with the fan mail: he got letters from farther away than anyone. Granted, much of it was scientific correspondence from within the international community, but a lot of it wasn’t. He got fan letters in Japanese, in Romanian, in Swahili and Afrikaans, in Italian, in Hebrew, in Spanish and in Swedish. And he answered them all, often in their native languages. One of the benefits, after all, of having an international community of physicists, astronomists, biologists, chemists, and combinations of all of the above, was an instantly available reliable translation service.

Not to mention an alibi. Very early on, Reed figured out that it would be better for team morale if someone reliably got the least amount of fan mail—it wasn’t going to be Johnny, it shouldn’t be Ben, and it would have been bad news if it were Sue—but the nominal ‘leader’ of the Fantastic Four found that everyone’s mood was better if they could look at his inbox and see only a pile of bills and letters from observatories and labs. They took direction better too—apparently brains were not as good a qualification for leadership as an apparent lack of popularity, which allowed the rest of them to feel superior and magnanimous. Plus it made Reed look like a good sport, and Victor was the only one who had ever thought that a bad thing.

All of which brought him around to the present moment, sitting pressed and presentable in some overpriced coffee shop, being interviewed by a journalist for People or some other such rag, because Sue had said it would “brush up his image.”

“So I’m told you handle most of the fan mail received by the Fantastic Four, Dr. Richards.”

Reed smiled politely and assented, a picture of ease in an overstuffed chair which could have swallowed even Ben if the former pilot could bring himself to trust his weight to it. “That’s right.”

“And what makes you take the time from your important research to tend to all those letters?” Her recorder tilted eagerly towards him as if salivating at the idea of something saccharine that would make for a perfect pull-quote, along the lines of ‘children are the future,’ or ‘a hero needs to care for the public’s affections as well as their safety,’ or even ‘I can’t trust Johnny not to set fire to them.’

Reed picked his cup off its saucer and held it in front of his mouth to conceal his smile. “You know how it is,” he said, “when he isn’t wearing a blanket and pretending to be a superhero, every five year old wants to be the mailman.”


End file.
